Grace Lee Boggs

“Creating this new economy starts by accepting that there are no solutions except the ones we imagine and implement.”

Go back, read that one more time and think about what it means. It’s worth it.

Tiffany sent me a link to an incredibly well-written article that is grounded with all the sense and wisdom that a 94-year-old activist, writer, and educator could attain. I went to the website for the Boggs Center, where I read up on all that this woman has done.

Watching this amazing elder speaking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is great – her thoughts, her energy, her courage to continue to inspire and motivate the world around her to recognize our place in history is amazing.

When she spoke with Danny Glover, the conversation was more interesting. “Evolution is not only anatomical, but is social and cultural,” she said. “[W]e are now experiencing the collapse of industrial civilization.” I’m really curious to keep reading more about this woman’s work – she’s been in the trenches for decades.

Her discussions sparked a lot of thoughts for me – I’ve been puzzling through the idea of “this whole Detroit thing”. I’m really interested in helping to spark a revolution there, and I guess I’m just not ready to pack up my bags and move over to Detroit. At least not yet. In the mean time, I’d like to get involved, and I want to inspire other people to act.

That’s a big part of the idea of the Superhero Action Project – helping people to find their inner Superhero and to take Action. I think the idea of projects works really well for people, since that’s the way that my generation seems to work. We take on projects – a documentary film, an internship, a consulting gig – I look at my restaurant job as a project. It’s something I do now for a variety of reasons, but seeing it as a project allows it to have a conclusion. Used to be, folks thought in terms of careers… now we think projects.

So embracing this – what can I do from Portland to help out Detroit?

I think I’d like to sell t-shirts and seeds.

How will that help, you say?

The Boggs Center has these dead-sexy shirts – plain black or red with white lettering that says

{r}evolution

on it – because revolution is evolution, get it?

I think it would be really neat to sell seeds that we can send to Detroit, and to sell garden equipment that we can send there – to get people to donate their old gardening supplies would be awesome. I’m sure that people could use them – and seriously, is there anything better that could happen there than more vegetables going in the ground? Screw federal bailouts – let’s pay poor people to grow themselves food. Grace Lee Boggs has been mobilizing youth to plant community gardens for years – let’s send them the supplies to keep doing more.

Grace Lee Boggs, you have reminded me that we are in the middle of the revolution that began in the 1960s, and I thank you for that. Because I was born into this time, it is hard for me to know the historical context of my surroundings – but thank god for great history teachers. In hundreds of years, when decades are explained away in small sentences and no longer even merit paragraphs, much less pages, they will write of this time as one of great change.

“May you live in interesting times.” – old curse.

Here we are people, in the middle of a great revolution. You are a Superhero, surrounded by turmoil. Victims are all around you – those who need food, water, shelter, and love. The villains are behind gates and security devices, guarded day and night by hired professionals – they are the same ones who took federal bailouts to rake in huge profits… What do you do?

Thank you to a living Superhero. Thank you, Grace Lee Boggs, for reminding me of how I want to spend my life – who I want to be when I reach 94 years of age. Thank you for modeling the behavior of what it means to be human.